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Considers why nationalism has surged again in China in the 1990s and what the content is of this nationalism. Looks at these issues from a literary perspective and examines some influential views and works of one of the most articulate and creative groups of intellectuals. (Original abstract - amended)

The effects of government subsidies to corporate R&D on firms' innovation outputs still remain inconclusive in existing studies. Moreover, little is known how the screening system of the public R&D programs influences the effect of such programs. This study examines the effects of Innofund (one of the largest Chinese government programs supporting corporate R&D activities) on firms' innovation outputs in China. In particular, the project screening mechanism was changed due to policy amendments in 2005. This exogenous policy shock allows us to estimate how the project screening system affects the influence of public R&D subsidies. Based on a panel dataset of Chinese manufacturing firms, we find Innofund-backed firms outperform their non-Innofund-backed counterparts in innovation, measured by the number of patents, new product sales, and the volume of exports after they gained funding. The magnification effects of Innofund are larger after 2005, when the project-screening scheme became more decentralized indicating that decentralized screening functions better in public R&D investment. Finally, the effects of Innofund and the effects of the decentralized screening system that occurred in 2005 vary substantially across markets. The more economically and institutionally developed the market is, the stronger the Innofund effects and the project selection decentralization effects appear. The identification problems are handled by using the propensity score matching approach and the instrumental variable approach. ; postprint

Using a unique hand-collected nationwide survey, this paper studies China's privatization, by far the largest one in human history. We find that privatization in China has improved performance, but only for firms bought out by managers (MBOs). Consistent with improved performance, MBO firms are less likely be influenced by the state in their daily operation and are more likely to take various restructuring measures. We also find city governments with stronger fiscal disciplines and with less political burdens of disposing laid-off works tend to use the MBO method to privatize. Our empirical design deals with the selection issues by applying a difference-in-difference approach and an IV approach. ; postprint

Access to information via social media is one of the biggest differentiators of public health crises today. During the early stages of the Covid-19 outbreak in January 2020, we conducted an experiment in Wuhan, China to assess the impact of viral social media content on pro-social and trust behaviours and preferences towards risk taking with known and unknown probabilities. Prior to the experiment, participants viewed one of two videos that had been widely and anonymously shared on Chinese social media: a central government leader visiting a local hospital and supermarket, or health care volunteers transiting to Wuhan. In a control condition, participants watched a neutral video, unrelated to the crisis. Viewing one of the leadership or volunteer videos leads to higher levels of pro-sociality and lesser willingness to take risks in an ambiguous situation relative to the control condition. The leadership video, however, induces lower levels of trust. We provide evidence from two post-experiment surveys that the video's impact on pro-sociality is modulated by influencing the viewer's affective emotional state.

© 2016 IEEE. Superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) systems with different superconducting materials are attracting great attentions and funding from the governments around the world because they are promising large-scale energy storage devices for future smart grid. Due to the high cost of SMES, its manufacturing quality and operation reliability have to be investigated in the design optimization stage. This paper presents a robust design optimization method to solve this issue based on a benchmark problem, TEAM problem 22. The proposed method is based on a technique called design for Six Sigma. Meanwhile, a three-level optimization framework is employed to reduce the computation cost of a finite-element analysis due to high-dimensional design space and Monte-Carlo analysis. As shown, the manufacturing reliability and quality of the investigated SMES after robust optimization have been increased greatly.

We investigated whether and how political misinformation is engineered using a dataset of four months worth of tweets related to the 2016 presidential election in the United States. The data contained tweets that achieved a significant level of exposure and was manually labelled into misinformation and regular information. We found that misinformation was produced by accounts that exhibit different characteristics and behaviour from regular accounts. Moreover, the content of misinformation is more novel, polarised and appears to change through coordination. Our findings suggest that engineering of political misinformation seems to exploit human traits such as reciprocity and confirmation bias. We argue that investigating how misinformation is created is essential to understand human biases, diffusion and ultimately better produce public policy.